Just over five years ago I entered into one of the most challenging periods of my life. At 28, I had become the executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) — a nonprofit that serves black immigrants and refugees, among the most disadvantaged populations in the nation — which was in the red.

SO, WHICH SIDE are you on? #TeamWest or #TeamCoates? Choose fast, preferably within seconds, and don’t come to this gunfight with a knife. No, like some nerdy Rambo, we want you greased up and loaded with ammo: your most painful character smears, your most “gotcha”...

The Webby Awards are humbled to recognize Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi & Patrisse Cullors, the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter organization, with The Webby Social Movement of the Year Award for their roles in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Immigration is a hot issue this election season. Unfortunately, despite the attention that news outlets and presidential candidates are giving the issue, the most devastating policies immigrants face—the 1996 immigration laws—are barely on the radar.

On July 13, 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, the activist Alicia Garza posted a simple message to Facebook from an Oakland cocktail bar: “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Her friend Patrisse Cullors saw...

Opal Tometi’s interest in immigration reform was born out of personal experience. Tometi grew up in Phoenix—”ground zero for the anti-immigration movement,” she says—and is the child of immigrants. Her parents moved to the U.S. from Nigeria in 1983, and Tometi, 30, was raised in a close-knit community of Nigerian immigrants.

Opal Tometi, like her cohorts, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, is invested in taking Black Lives Matter beyond police brutality, and her work addresses everything from mass criminalization to the adverse impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on communities of color.

A shift has occurred in the year since Michael Brown’s death sparked unrest in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. National conversations have arisen around issues affecting the black community in America: police brutality, economic injustice, racial inequality.

While the media still primarily pay attention to institutionalized racism when a black heterosexual cisgender man is killed by police, organizers on the ground are looking to grow a movement that ensures liberation across sexual, gender, and class identity.

Pew Research is just discovering something: Black people are not all the same. This is a truth that the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) has been living for the nearly decade of its existence. And it is a truth that Black people have known for generations.

A first-generation Nigerian American, Tometi has been active in immigrant rights for much of the last decade. As director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, she became a vocal opponent of Arizona’s controversial SB-1070.

Dr. King nurtured visions of a movement that could restore a deep and abiding love for all of humanity; a world where the restoration of democracy and full citizenship, of an economic system that could provide for everyone, and an end to war and militarization.

“In 2015 I want to see our communities continue to rise up to challenge the criminalization of our people. At the national and local level my organization BAJI and the national network we coordinate, the Black Immigration Network, will be campaigning to end mass incarceration, detention and deportation.”

A family in Connecticut is suing the school district for banning their daughter from class after she got back from Nigeria. In the Bronx, two middle school boys originally from Senegal, Africa, said students have been harassing them with Ebola taunts.

Nearly 40 years ago, Micheline Charles left her native Haiti in search of a better life for her family in the United States. After six years, she secured visas and other documentation that allowed her to bring her little boy and girl to Southern Florida. Life was better but not without some struggle.